Monday, January 22, 2007

BGs and Style - Part 6 - Scale

The greater the contrast between the size of your forms and the size of your details, the greater the scale.After sending the service studio many of Jim Smith's designs of BGs and mountains like the one on top of the page above, they would send us back drawings like the one below it.

17 comments:

can you give more examples of more small details you can do to make something look larger. You mentioned this on a Ren and Stimpy episode with a giant and I wasn't quite sure what small details you'd put on the giant to make him bigger.

Hey there Mr. K. First thing is I like many others have started taking your drawing/animation lessons. Here's a link to my blog and if you or anyone would be kind enough to comment I sure would appreciate it.

http://mtklinger.blogspot.com/

I've got one set of drawings up now but I should have more very soon.

Also I read your blog pretty regularly and it has been a real help to me and one of my good friends come along with our drawing skills.

Along with teaching things that most schools don't go over or at best graze over you also have helped me appreciate somethings I took for granted. For instance beautiful backgrounds in television cartoons and crazy poses and inbetweens in film cartoons. I definitely don't agree with all the opinions you have but you definitely have alot of good stuff here and I hope you continue to share your stories.

Ahhh. . . so this is why Bob Ross got away with decent paintings in less than an hour--paintings with monumental scale and minimal need for refined detail.

The analytical side in my cabeza sometimes veered from drawing anything with a large scale in reality for fear that it would take exponentially longer to draw, but that's poppycock. Awesome pointers. Gracias, John.

Hey JohnI'm actually sitting in class right now as I'm typing. Its a stupid 3D class, DIgital Form Lighting and Space.I can't wait to get out of this class and capture some animation I've been working on.I did some stuff inspired by Ken Harris' work in "Falling Hare"Your post is the only thing keeeping me awake in class

This is a good point. Sometimes when drawing I try to use more exaggeration than needed and my earlier drawings have too much in them now that I look back. They have no control over them, but after continuous drawing I realized that it's not only little exaggeration of shapes and forms that is needed to make a cartoon fun to look at but also a sense of control over what you're drawing. These drawings that you noted are "wrong" definitely have this lack of control, almost like they just let their pencil run wild without them even holding it. These are always so inspirational, thanks again John!

Whats the point of having Jim Smith draw a background when somebody else with less talent redraws it a completely different way? Wouldn't it just be easier to have Jim Smith do the final artwork to begin with?

great post, I am working on a background right now of the White House and I was noticing it looked too small, and it's exactly because I drew trees around it that made it look small, even tho trees can be large, the details were too large-looking making the building look way too small. This post had perfect timing for me. Keep up the great blogging, you really are helping people... at least me for sure.

Remember the movie The Dark Crystal? The opening scene shows the castle, looking for all the world like a tiny model set down in the middle of a tiny sound stage with tiny mountains around it. Which of course it was.

I've always wondered how they could have improved that shot. If they could have read this blog, they might have snuggled the castle against a mountain (overlap), removed a lot of textured detail from the castle, and added dead trees near the bottom. They probably should have choose a camera angle looking up, rather than slightly down, and avoided showing the ground it was on.